


Hearts of Glass

by cher



Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Bloodplay, Courting Rituals, F/M, First Time, Knifeplay, Non-Human Genitalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:55:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/pseuds/cher
Summary: The Staryk are not human. Miryem learns what she needs to know to bring her lord to her bed.
Relationships: Miryem Mandelstam/The Staryk Lord
Comments: 11
Kudos: 168
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Hearts of Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDarkStoryteller/gifts).



The Staryk lord had grown used to surprise, where his lady was concerned. Easy-taken, hard-won, and now she was to be won again, season after season. It would not have suited him before he had taken her, nor for an eventful while after that. He had been a fool twice over and learned from it, and so now he knew her value and it was greater than any effort he must go to to win her anew.

She did not come easily to the marriage bed. Now, he saw her wisdom, her cunning as she trapped him into asking for what should be his by right.

His lady was a magnificent queen, and she had taught him more of himself than he had known lay inside him. The gift of self knowledge was a very great one, and to know that he came alive and awake for such a challenge as she! He, who had taken everything, was offered everything, now best pleased by being denied! It was marvellous, another work of high magic.

_

Married Miryem might be, but still her husband the Staryk kept his distance. It was as if he needed to stack all of his previously lacking respect in a heaping monument between them, its height to rival the Staryk mountain itself. He visited her chambers often, he brought gifts and conversation, he brought his hauteur and his impossible demands, and he laughed in delight each time she proved him ridiculous. And yet still he kept his distance. 

Perhaps there remained his people's courtship to complete to his own satisfaction, she had thought, and schooled herself to patience. She warmed to him some days, the glittering otherness of him, and on other days she still grew so incensed that had she less regard for her own dignity she might have slapped him. And still, sometimes he approached her, in passion or in calm fascination. She knew what it was to be pressed, full length, against his form. She knew that she was impatient to know him as a wife ought, and also that she could not bear it if she had misunderstood his reasons for waiting and was rebuffed. 

And she thought she would need to understand more of the Staryk people, lest she be surprised on the night he finally came to her bed. 

Miryem went to Flek when she wanted to ask the sorts of questions that she could not ask in polite company; or really, in anything but acute embarrassment. To ask about courtship was one thing, but to ask about the most private details of anatomy and custom was quite another. Miryem knew the difficulty she placed on her friend, asking such things, and saw no reason to trouble Tsop as well when just the two of them could be mortified together. 

Flek answered her as best she could, halting, looking at her and away, always asking with her eyes if Miryem understood yet, if she needed yet more explained, the things the Staryk knew and had no need to speak of. Usually, Miryem did need more explained. In this matter, she would not risk the far greater embarrassment of stepping wrong in the company of her lord. 

And so in the halting conversations she had learned, mortified and trying to hold her dignity, tempted and yet refusing to fall to schoolgirl laughter, what she needed to know to bring her lord to the bed chamber.

The answers, she felt, should not have surprised her at all, and yet they had. The Staryk people looked so close to being human, and yet. Well.

And so she laid her plans, and all the while they sparred and parried, stymied and impressed one another, and Miryem slid between resentment and her growing, half-grudging, half-frightening desire for him.

From whispers and court jests Miryem heard that the winter people were a fierce people, whose hearts opened only to the worthy challenger. She had thought this was metaphorical advice, and that she understood it, had already proved herself worthy ten times over. Flek explained, in a strained whisper lest her embarrassment be overheard, the truth.

Her lord had to be won true, with blood and blade. 

And so Miryem spun herself a glove of gold, a filigreed shining thing that had something in common with a bracelet and a ring. She sang the fingertips to finest points, added sharp tips and facets to flash in the Staryk-light. She settled it on her hand, and her golden claws gleamed.

The sight pleased her.

The next night, when they had fought in the afternoon and reached an accord over their evening meal, Miryem set her glove on her hand and called him to her. Curious and imperious, he came. 

She set her glove to his chest, where his shirt parted around the ties that held it shut in the daytime. Her golden claws on his shining ice-covered skin were a sight to behold, and he looked down at her hand against him, assessing, not moving. She pressed, not lightly, and his silver-white skin parted around the pointed tips, and his blood touch the air with its chill.

His eyes lit, then, and he pressed forward, eager, almost leaping toward her pricking, slicing hand. Surprised, she pushed him down, her strength usually no equal to his and yet so easily, he came to rest on her bed. It was sweet to stand over him so. She'd seen him brought low and taken satisfaction in victory but no joy in his pain, but this was something different. This was his willing surrender, though she knew that tomorrow he would be the same viciously prideful creature he always had been.

"What will you do now, lady," he asked of her, eager and perhaps a little arch. "Blood from the king, drawn by the queen, it is a powerful thing."

"Powerful enough that your clothes may melt away, my lord, or shall I see to that as well?" 

His eyes flashed, and he spoke a word she had not heard before, and indeed his clothing did melt away. 

She traced her golden glove, so beautiful and now yet more so against his glittering skin, along the chest that was now revealed to her. 

He surged up before her, hungry for it. The blood, the claws, Miryem herself, all three.

There he was, unclothed, and the source of her confusion uncovered at last, Flek's halting words confirmed. Between his legs was a blank space, a smoothly armoured plate, gleaming blue and white with his frost. No sex, or rather, his sex hidden away from the cold and from battle. And if the advice was correct, then if she blooded him again—if she sliced his chest so that he threw back his head and gasped, then—

Naked before her, the almost familiar form with its tightly furled sheath, the armour against the cold, at least unfurled for her. That was the secret knowledge that her friendship had brought her: a Staryk must be won, with blood and passion, or locked away he would stay. And here he was under her now, her created claw fingertips leaving streaks on his chest, his blood painting his skin, and his eyes fiercely intent on her.

There. Her lord here for the taking, and she took him and rode him and they cried out fit for the kingdom to hear them. His sex, emerging from its sheath was large and proud, and gleamed with his fluids. She sank down upon him as he lay still and transfixed, her golden claws set lightly to his side, the threat widening his eyes and making him pant.

She rode him, her hands in his hair, and then when her pleasure was done for the first time, she had him again, demanding her pleasure of him as he lay over her.

His hair fell around them in a curtain of silver, and she wound hanks of it in her hands and pulled, pushed, demanded. Every tug brought him surging into her, exciting him more and more until his animal rut, half terrifying, half thrilling and entirely, unexpectedly, what she wanted, brought her screaming.

After, he stretched and curled like a cat, self-satisfied and preening.

After, she locked away her golden claws, and she was perhaps more satisfied than he. And when she looked closely at her human hand, she thought that she was not imagining the way her fingertips looked a little more sharp than they had done, her fingernails a faint sheen of gold.

But make her claws or grow them, the Staryk lord would lie content with her. 


End file.
